English
EspañolHe who loves knows how to wait for the moment when his love can express its maximum fruitfulness without fear, reservations, or amputations. True love does not blackmail, threaten or burden, does not ask for what is premature and inopportune, does not rush time, and then runs away from its consequences.
Text
“…love refuses every impulse to close in on itself; it is open to a fruitfulness that draws it beyond itself.” (The Joy of Love, n.80)
Commentary
When sexual relationships are demanded, before being united in marriage, it is inevitable to try to prevent the natural opening of fertility or “risk of pregnancy,” inherent in the genital act, because we do not feel prepared to assume it. We want to live the moment without assuming consequences. We young people believe that we establish deep relationships by giving ourselves both physically and emotionally to another person while also taking precautions to avoid fertility. We probably make several serious mistakes.
The first is to confuse the emotional and pleasurable intensity with the depth and realism of love. Experience has proven us correct. Most of these relationships are short-lived. Despite the intensity, they do not have deep roots. Moreover, they quickly follow one after the other, showing what they have on the surface but not their actual depth. Those that are prolonged can end up in a routine cohabitation that, paradoxically, shows its weakness when it enters into crisis soon after officially getting married. Statistics are definitive.
The second significant error is to assume that the sexual relationship can be separated from a man’s paternal dimension and a woman’s maternal dimension. The result is to “convince ourselves that we know each other” when in reality, we are profoundly unaware of who we are; we hide from each other our true character and how we would react if faced with the concrete responsibilities that children bring. We give each other a partial and false version of who we are and of our real maturity to love seriously. Mere sex, premature, focused solely on physicality and contraceptive measures, prevents us from realistically knowing ourselves, disguises us, and deceives us about the meaning or genuinely loving each other. Hence, the frequent disenchantments and the sad, bitter taste they leave in our souls. When does this disenchantment occur? It happens when real life inevitably brings us back down to earth and real personalities come to light.
What if the demands of such premature relationships did not come from true love but an egocentric search for pleasure, from converting the other person into a mere sexual object into a means to satisfy a sexual craving for their body? What if the demands made one over the other were a symptom of domination, blackmail, and coercion? Furthermore, what if, on top of that, they had the imposture and deceit of presenting themselves by invoking love as their pretext?
